A Silicon Valley startup called Lytro promises to reinvent consumer point-and-shoot cameras with its new digital model. The Lytro “light field” camera looks like no other and lets you focus or re-focus your pictures on a computer after you take them.
If you had to give an award for the year’s most breakthrough piece of consumer tech, there’s a good chance it would go to Lytro, a camera company which recently unveiled its first product. Unlike other cameras, you never need to focus it. Rather, the images it takes are interactive you can change their focus later, meaning that you can take pictures of a fleeting moment without having to check whether the right thing was in the picture. And because the camera never needs focusing or adjustments, it never has any shutter lag. It is truly just a point and shoot.